This might function well for some business models, but a lot of photographers (like me) have a policy of several years of storage for clients. Just the other day I got a request for some images taken on a shoot more than seven years ago by a private client. I could provide this due to software being able to read these files, had they not I would not have made an easy extra income.

This type of thing is not a must-have feature, but it is annoying that it is not there, and it is annoying that manufacturers don't care, and at least I find it annoying that my work is stored in a secret container which gives the manufacturer control over which platforms and workflows that works. As soon as the image is out of the camera I want it to be as free as possible from intellectual property claims from other entities. Having it in an open format helps.

So you should give them what they deserve - continue nagging and nagging and nagging about DNG support until they can't take it anymore and just implement it

I was one of the users of Premiere, for it came with the RasterOps MoviePak™ board when the company I worked for at the time wanted to get into the computer/ non-linear editing services. We had a full Betacam A/B roll suite, and we saw that the future would include digital editing, at least so that we could sample/ digitize the tapes to include video into our CD productions. If you can't tell, this was in the early nineties.

So the company went in big, and got a Quadra 950, AV rated Micropolis [SCSI] drives, with a MoviePak board, which came with Premiere [version 1] as the software pack.

Continents shift, stars fade.

With version 4.5 Adobe decides to stop supporting the Truevision Targa 200 Pro, which was, at the time, the digitizing board we were using on both our workstations.

After some research, we find out that Apple Final Cut Pro [version 1.25] supports the Truevision Targa 200 Pro. We decide to move both of our editing stations to FCPro.

Main issue:- No translator for Premiere projects to FCPro, meaning that any old project would not be accessible or transferable. We keep an older machine setup as the Adobe Premiere station, to have access to the prior four years of edits/ projects.- Two different companies, at two different software development efforts, were not expected to have a common file format that easily allowed full project compatibility.

Apple:Moving ahead to the transition from Final Cut Pro v7.x to Final Cut Pro vX [ten].- Apple breaks compatibility between the two version, citing a completely new codebase as the reason that creating a translator would not be worth the time- Apple immediately stops [without forewarning] the sale of FCPro v7- User base pushes back- Apple extends the sale of FCPro v7- Automatic Duck creates a 'translator' between FCPro 7 and FCPro X

World is saved, until next time, right?

What the above examples [probably] illustrates, and points to ponder:- if both companies had takes resources to write their file/ project formats to a universal format [which at the time would have been either AVID of Media 100] it would not have had an impact on sales: Premiere and FCPro were bought by those who could not afford AVID.- Only with companies seeing a clear cost/ benefit argument does a dev team take the resources to write to a format that is alien to their codebase- clear cost/ benefit argument occurs when many current customers call for a feature [that would get the user base to upgrade, offsetting the development costs of said new feature]- professional programs require stability, and in my experience, the resources that would go to a feature [relatively] fewwould use would instead be put to fixing stability or improving speed- Leica now depends on Adobe Lightroom supporting the exact DNG format from Leica cameras. They are beholden to Adobe. If Adobe stops supporting [insert operating system here, like Windows XP], then all that user base stops getting updates/ upgrades.- It it the users' responsibility to translate/ convert files that will become obsolete with the termination of formats or software- MacPaint [on OS6/7] used to be the 'universal' bitmap drawing file format: what happened to that?- WordPerfect used to be franca lingua for word processing: what happened to that? Does *anything* read WordPerfect?- I used to know [and use] WordPerfect. I'm that old. Though not too old. My files are on 5.25" diskettes. They are 'lost' unless I put a massive amount of resources to 'get them back'. The same for any other file on a medium that is retired or obsolete.- I don't know of many companies that would help you NOT be loyal to their products, by making it easier to move to another supplier/ manufacturer.

- Leica now depends on Adobe Lightroom supporting the exact DNG format from Leica cameras. They are beholden to Adobe. If Adobe stops supporting [insert operating system here, like Windows XP], then all that user base stops getting updates/ upgrades.

The DNG file format is not OS dependent...applications are. Yes, LR and ACR (and DNG Converter) versions are limited to specific OS versions such as LR 4 dropping XP and Mac OS X 10.5.8. But a DNG from a Leica camera should be usable in older apps that are no longer supported. So, Leica is not beholden to Adobe for DNG support (except for the fact they OEM Lightroom and include it with their cameras–but that's a different deal and doesn't related to the question of DNG support).

More on cross-platform: Adobe's DNG SDK is source based and although they only provide Mac OS X and windows build scripts out-of-the-box, it is fairly easy to build on Linux (I just did) and the code looks portable, and it is an MIT license, that is that you can use this code free of charge and without licensing issues in both free and commercial and closed source and open source projects, just like it should be for an open file format.

Small independent developers as well as large can use this format for free and sell applications with support for it using readily available code, all without even talking to Adobe.

I'm satisfied with the openness of this format, and I'm not easy to please